Over the next few weeks I'm going to be unifying the forum administration with the game administration team.

Meaning in game admins will have limited mod powers in the on topic sections, game masters will have global mod powers, and headmins will be forum admins.

The most important part is i'll be making a set of unified community rules that apply equally to ooc, forums, discord, and irc, as right now we have a mess of rules and conflicting standards.

This also means admin complaints, ban appeals, and admin feedback will grow in purpose, something that players have asked for for a while.

In regards to the current bit of drama, I'll be encoding some standards relating to communication with banned users about why they are banned. (as a side note: This will also include a general rule for admins against announcing to other users that users are banned or why they are banned.)

If you are wondering what direction I'm going to go with all of this, I'll leave you with a quote.

hornygranny wrote:This was so long ago not many people will remember, but we left goonstation because we wanted a place to play where we would all be treated fairly and transparently, rather than according to the whims of an admin team who didn't feel the need to justify their actions.

I can't say it's an outright bad idea but I want to point out major reasons we never did something like this in the past was to try to give the forums a bit more of a "neutral zone" territory between the administration and playerbase. It wasn't until late in the Erro forums era that in-game admins were even given forum mod powers, and even then it was only a very few of us who were extremely active on the forums (Ie like the whole cleaning up FNR thing) and dedicated to keeping the discourse neutral and fair.

I think the recent situations, my own situation that lead to my hut confiment as well, shows how important it is that maybe game admins and such DON'T have control over the discussion forums.

Having a unified code of conduct sounds great, but I think it would be best served if the forums had their own independent staff that was intended to remain impartial when it comes to SRS BSNS.

Dax Dupont wrote:>This will also include a general rule for admins against announcing to other users that users are banned or why they are banned.

Will this include in ahelps? I often let the victim know of what action was taken, especially if they seem especially wronged.

To add to this, sometimes someone did something particularly notorious (BoHbombing the shuttle as a non-antag, etc etc) and it tends to eat up OOC for a while with people asking if they got banned/if anything's being done. I wouldn't say we need to supply the information in those situations but I definitely think it's helpful to players who otherwise can end up feeling like the admins are letting people get away with stuff.

Iterating that people don't have a right to know why other people have been bannedAt the same time that you give everyone responsible for the bans power over the #1 vehicle for communication outside the game

You put these two things together and it starts to look like shit is heading in a real skeevy direction.

Iterating that people don't have a right to know why other people have been bannedAt the same time that you give everyone responsible for the bans power over the #1 vehicle for communication outside the game

You put these two things together and it starts to look like shit is heading in a real skeevy direction.

Are you really saying that admins announcing that people were banned doesn't look like preschool banter?

How do admins new to the staff or are currently being trained by others factor in? A large influx of new staff over the course of this and last year leave the question whether they will manage to slip into the new system, either aren't needed or if aren't retrained again under new guidelines could re-establish the problem.

As far as telling people someone got banned, it can help a lot in cases where someone is obviously griefing and then at round's end, when they're not antag, you get a flood of ahelps at round end and the beginning of the next round all going "HEY SO URIST MCDUMBFUCK TOOLBOXED ME TO DEATH AND 10 OTHER PEOPLE CAN YOU LOOK INTO THIS."

The not telling people you banned someone is halfbaked and I doubt it will get enforced with much enthusiasm by the admin team, it's quite common to let people know the griefer last round was banned so they know it was handled etc.

I mean we don't tell everyone the specifics but it's not uncommon.

Also the ban will be public when they appeal it anyway.

Merging the forum and admin teams is fine I guess, there was never a really active forum moderation team and our community clearly isn't big enough to support both.

Besides if people want to post without fear of the admins they know where they can go!

Why wouldn't you communicate to a banned individual why they were banned? That's like a police officer throwing you in prison without telling you the reason or letting you appeal.

Am I just misunderstanding this but for example a blacklist ban like what happened to goof (with no prior warning or probation) would just pop up as "you were banned for x reason goodbye". Nobody would "be the wiser" but the admin team who banned him and people who "leak" information to the public would be punished?

In my mind if someone is banned for a reason you should tell them that reason and then allow them to appeal the issue on the forums. If this happened to begin with the whole recent incident would have never happened.

As far as making admins accountable for their actions on the forums, I'll believe it when I see it.

CosmicScientist wrote:I feel Wyzack has just tipped his hand. He is pure evil and now no-one can stop him. Though what to do with this information, well, do we have a mary sue hero who can save the day?

>made this, realised a fault, the currently use version still has the fault of the dark line between the nuke op's legs>never dived into the site's github to find out if I could edit the image there to not bother you

>active contributor to singulo even when no drama fuels it as to counterbalance the depression posts and lack of imageposting on an imageboard

random sawrge thing from years ago to show that I totally don't have deep ties in the sawrge conspiracy so don't worry, I'm on the right side,

I play the game for fun, hence doing this in a gang round instead of breaking it and then demanding its removal:

I made a collage of almost everyone I can name or describe the character of back when I think the hut was the shack, ignore the continued sawrge appearances as there is no conspiracy here, nudge nudge:

I am personally of the opinion that there should be a separation of powers. A /tg/station trias politica, with the server, the forums and the codebase. If you want to make changes it should be to the checks and balances between them, rather than merging two branches of power into one.

MimicFaux wrote:I remember my first time, full of wonderment and excitement playing this game I had heard so many stories about. on the arrival shuttle, I saw the iconic toolbox on the ground. I clubbed myself in the head with it trying to figure out the controls.Setting the tool box, now bloodied, back on the table; I went to heal myself with a medkit. I clubbed myself in the head with that too.I've come a long ways from asking how to switch hands.

Spoiler:

#coderbus wrote:<MrPerson> How many coders does it take to make a lightbulb? Three, one to make it, one to pull the pull request, and one to fix the bugs

Kor wrote:The lifeweb playerbase is primarily old server 2 players so technically its our cancer that invaded them

peoplearestrange wrote:Scared of shadows whispers in their final breath, "/tg/station... goes on the tabl..."

DemonFiren wrote:Please, an Engineer's first response to a problem is "throw it into the singulo".

tedward1337 wrote:Donald Trump is literally what /pol/ would look like as a person

CrunchyCHEEZIT wrote:why does everything on this server have to be a federal fucking issue.

Saegrimr wrote:One guy was running around popping hand tele portals down in the halls before OPs even showed up and got several stranded out on lavaland.The HoP just toolboxes someone to death out of nowhere, then gets speared by a chemist who saw him murder a guy, then the chemist gets beaten to death because someone else saw him kill the HoP.Tele-man somehow dies and gets its looted by an atmos tech who managed to use it to send two nuke ops to lavaland, who were then surrounded by several very angry people from earlier and some extra golems on top of it.Captain dies, gets cloned/revived, lasers the guy holding the disk into crit to take it back.Some idiot tries to welderbomb the AI hiding out at mining for no discernible reason.Two permabans and a dayban, i'm expecting a snarky appeal from one of them soon. What the fuck.

MrStonedOne"[quote="hornygranny wrote:This was so long ago not many people will remember, but we left goonstation because we wanted a place to play where we would all be treated fairly and transparently, rather than according to the whims of an admin team who didn't feel the need to justify their actions.

[/quote]Interesting sentiment, but perhaps Horny 'Separation of Codebase and Serverbase is Absolute' Granny isn't the best spokesperson for it - one may even say they're worst person for it.

Ricotez wrote:I am personally of the opinion that there should be a separation of powers. A /tg/station trias politica, with the server, the forums and the codebase. If you want to make changes it should be to the checks and balances between them, rather than merging two branches of power into one.

We had that. It was shit and fell apart when the few people that cared left.

Why pretend that there's any separation between forum, code and server? In the time I've been playing we've been through three (four?) hosts, three forums, two code bases, literally endless drama and somehow the community has managed to stay together. There's people that don't even play the fucking spaceman game anymore but they're still here.

bandit wrote:we already have a punishment for using our code for your game, it's called using our code for your game

The evil holoparasite user I can't believe its not DIO and his holoparasite I can't believe its not Skub have been defeated by the Spacedust Crusaders, but what has been taken from the station can never be returned.

OOC: TheGel: Literally a guy in a suit with a shuttle full of xenos. That's a doozy

Iterating that people don't have a right to know why other people have been bannedAt the same time that you give everyone responsible for the bans power over the #1 vehicle for communication outside the game

You put these two things together and it starts to look like shit is heading in a real skeevy direction.

Are you really saying that admins announcing that people were banned doesn't look like preschool banter?

Its unprofessional and kinda shitty

It should not be announced by an admin speaking in OOC, or any other way on the game server, that so-and-so got banned for this-and-that but I would be in favor of a banlog similiar to the one 4chan employs (for reference), except that the ckey of the banned account would be shown.This eliminates any possible interpretation done by players in how the admin words it and there will be no ongoing lengthy discussion about it in OOC right after the ban. It's neutral and transparent for all sides, and if you don't wanna be put on the spot and have everybody know you got banned, then don't get banned.

It wouldn't need to be fancy, a sample could look like this:CKEY - Reason - Duration - AdminTerranaut - Maxcapped the escape shuttle as it was arriving on CentComm but before the round had ended due to lag, killing three others. Please be aware that rules are in effect until the round end message is displayed. - 1440 - PenterwastOptionally the Round ID could be displayed aswell. Personally I can't think of a good use for the Round ID right now but I haven't been an admin for years so that doesn't mean anything.

Doing it this way also eliminates any and all hear-say and unrealiblity of second-hand information and enables a better base to discuss policy and handling with in the future. A banning admin is encouraged to give a clear and concise reason (more so than anyway). Furthermore it gives unexperienced admins an idea of how long a ban could be for a given action without them having to worry about being too lenient or too harsh when there's nobody around to ask.